Peace and Justice Post

Activists accuse Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of very same practices uprising sought to abolish.

Jailan Zayan in Cairo, Middle East Online, June 1, 2011

A looming revolt against the new military rulers?

Three months after toppling Hosni Mubarak, activists behind Egypt’s revolt have grown increasingly frustrated with the new military rulers, accusing them of the very same practices the uprising sought to abolish.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took charge after Mubarak ceded power in the face of 18 days of anti-government protests, has repeatedly maintained it is the guardian of the revolt, committed to protecting its goals.

But its status as revolt hero began to fade with allegations of human rights abuses, crackdowns against protesters and attempts to silence critics.

While the uprising achieved its main goal of ousting Mubarak, the unelected military council maintains its absolute power in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Social networking sites have been awash with a laundry list of grievances against the military council, including the pace of democratic change and more specifically accusations of alleged torture, jailing of critics and arrest of activists.

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Mr. Hameed Haroon, the chief executive officer of the Dawn, a leading daily newspaper of Pakistan and the president of the All Pakistan Newspaper Society, an organization of owners of the print media, has confirmed that the slain journalist, Mr. Saleem Shahzad, had received threatening messages from Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency, the ISI on at least three occasions. Shahzad had not only informed his employer, the Asia Time Online but also Mr. Haroon and other friends of these threats.

This statement from Mr. Haroon refuted the charges of the ISI official that the accusation of the involvement of the ISI in Shahzad’s murder was baseless. Shahzad told Mr. Haroon in an email after a meeting on October 18, 2010, in which military and navy officers were present, that he was being pressurised to disclose his source of information about the release of a notorious Taliban commander from Pakistani custody.

The confirmation from a media house owner that Shahzad was under threat from the ISI is enough to expose the workings of the invisible intelligence agencies for the intimidation and murder of citizens in general and journalists in particular. The statement from the ISI was merely an attempt to cover up its common practice of threatening anyone it sees as a potential risk. It is no secret that every investigative journalist is expected to disclose the source of their information to the military run intelligence services.

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By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent, The Independent, June 2, 2011

AP: Syed Saleem Shahzad was murdered following the publication of his article alleging links between al-Qa’ida and Pakistan’s Navy

As the friends and family of Syed Saleem Shahzad said prayers and buried the murdered reporter, journalists across Pakistan flew black flags in protest and demanded a genuine investigation be opened into his death.

The body of Mr Shahzad, 40, the correspondent for Asia Times Online, was flown from Islamabad to his home city of Karachi and laid to rest at the Qayyumabad graveyard yesterday. Earlier, hundreds of people had said funeral prayers for him at the city’s Mubarak mosque.

The discovery of Mr Shahzad’s body, along with his car and identity card, about 100 miles south of Islamabad, was revealed on Tuesday afternoon. His body had been found in a shallow canal the day before by villagers in the Mandi Bahauddin district.

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By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, June 1, 2011

The NATO command in Afghanistan Tuesday brushed aside President Hamid Karzai’s demand for a halt to air strikes and night raids on Afghan homes.

Karzai issued the demand in the face of mass popular outrage over a US air strike that killed 14 civilians—10 of them children and two of them women—in the southern Afghan province of Helmand on the night of May 28. It was only the latest in a series of atrocities carried out by American forces that have resulted in mass civilian casualties.

Speaking at a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan president declared, “From this moment, air strikes on the houses of people are not allowed.”

Karzai continued by warning: “If after the Afghan government said the aerial bombing of Afghan houses is banned and if it continues, then their presence will change from a war against terrorism to an occupying force. And in that case, Afghan history is witness to how the Afghans deal with occupying forces.”

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Saleem Shahzad, who had earlier announced the danger to his life from the intelligence services (ISI) in Pakistan was abducted last Sunday, May 29, and his body was discovered on May 31. This is one more of the mysterious abductions and extrajudicial killings that have been taking place in Pakistan on a regular basis. He is the 70th journalist to meet this fate since the year 2000. Many other civilians have also been abducted and disappeared and their numbers are counted in the thousands. The state has failed to recognise these large scale abductions and killings and take any effective action to prevent them from occurring. In fact, the popular perception is that these abductions and killings take place with the knowledge of the country’s intelligence services and other authorities.

Mr. Saleem Shahzad was known to the Asian Human Rights Commission. He was shocked by many of the happenings related to security operations and was engaged in exposing these through his journalism. He was a committed journalist who defended the freedom of expression and called for accountability and protection for the people. It was his commitment to truth and the belief of his own duties to his community that cost him his life.

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by Jack A. Smith, Foreign Policy Journal,  June 1, 2011

You’ve seen the headlines in the last weeks and days:

The Arab uprisings, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Washington’s efforts to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq beyond pullout schedules, Egypt’s reopening of the border with Gaza, Pakistan’s role in the Afghan war, President Barack Obama’s speeches on the Middle East and Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence, the Fatah-Hamas unity moves and plans to gain UN recognition of Palestinian statehood — and that’s not the half of it.

Each event looms large in the mass media and in political discourse, but each is only part of a much larger mosaic that constitutes the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and Central Asia component of the Obama Administration’s foreign and military strategy.

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If in 2008 someone had said that Obama’s war policy would be more belligerent and costlier than another round of Bush’s, nearly no one would have believed it. Bush started a preventive war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands without any credible correlation to U.S. security, except perhaps a very negative one. He turned a hunt for bin Laden into an excuse to stumble around in Afghanistan at great cost without any clear idea of how the war and occupation were going to improve the situation there. He spent a trillion dollars, just in direct costs, and lost 4,000 American troops in these aggressive and endless wars.

Obama came along and promised to make it all better. Before he was a U.S. senator, he opposed the U.S. war in Iraq. As a presidential candidate, he vowed to exercise more restraint and wind down the U.S. presence in Iraq.

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news24,  May 30, 2011

Warsaw – Secret prisons operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Polish territory violated international law and the Polish constitution according to legal experts, reported the daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Monday, citing sources close to an investigation.

The CIA held terror suspects inside a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty, north-eastern Poland from 2002 to 2005, anonymous Polish intelligence officers have said.

Public prosecutor Jerzy Mierzewski had wanted to charge officials from the 2001-2005 Democratic Left Alliance government with violating the constitution, unlawful detention and participation in crimes against humanity, the daily reported.

The left-wing party is today Poland’s second largest opposition party. Polish politicians who were in power when the prisons allegedly operated have denied allegations that CIA prisons were located in the country.

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